Machiavelli - The First Century

Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility, and Irrelevance

Sydney Anglo

Description

Between 1513 and 1525 Niccolò Machiavelli wrote a series of works dealing with political, military, and historical matters. One of these (the 'Arte della guerra') was published in 1521, but the rest of his major writings were not published until 1531-2, nearly five years after his death. They continued to be reissued regularly, well into the early seventeenth century. The popularity of Machiavelli's books, the variety of his themes, the different contexts within which he was studied, the range of readers' interests, and the fact that his name entered the vocabulary of every European language - all make his early reception a fruitful field of enquiry. Historians of ideas have tended to tidy up the past in order to make it comprehensible but Sydney Anglo is
concerned with heterogeneity, and with the often irrational and emotional aspects of sixteenth-century thought. Basing his research entirely upon primary sources he quotes extensively in the conviction that, in a battle of words, the words themselves and their tone convey more than summaries of intellectual abstractions.

Machiavelli - The First Century

Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility, and Irrelevance

Sydney Anglo

Table of Contents

Introduction: Problems Regarding MethodI. Early Readership 1. The Earliest Readers of Machiavelli: Miscellaneous and Military2. Creative Plagiarism: Agostino Nifo's De regnandi peritia3. Early Readers of Machiavelli: Comment and Discourse4. A Hostile Cardinal: Reginald Pole and his Apologia5. Osorio and Machiavelli: From Open Hostility to Covert Approbation6. Machiavelli and the Index of Prohibited Books7. Machiavelli's Keenest Readers: The Early TranslatorsII. The Rhetoric of Hate 8. In Praise of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre9. Innocent Gentillet and Machiavelli's 'Maximes tyranniques'10. In the Wake of Gentillet: Evolution of the 'Machiavel' Stereotype in France and England11. More
Machiavellian than Machiavel: The Jesuits and the Context of Donne's ConclaveIII. Adaptation, Attack, Defence 12. Gentillet's Final Assault: The 'Contre-Machiavel' of 158513. From Sublime to Ridiculous: Some Serious Readers of Machiavelli14. Writers on the Art of WarIV. Machiavelli and Non-Machiavelli 15. Paradoxes on the Reception of Machiavelli's Military Thinking16. Systematic Immorality: The Courtier's Art17. Systematic Fragmentation: The Vogue of the Political AphorismEpilogueBibliographyIndex

Machiavelli - The First Century

Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility, and Irrelevance

Sydney Anglo

Author Information

Sydney Anglo is Professor Emeritus, Department of History, University of Wales, and was Chairman of the Society for Renaissance Studies 1986-89. His publications includeThe Great Tournament Roll of Westminster; (Clarendon Press, 1968), and Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford-Warburg Studies 1969, new edition 1997), and The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe (Yale, 2000 - see sales figures). He is a leading authority in the field of Renaissance studies.